movies

cinekink300x200 CineKink Announces Dates for Tenth Annual Kinky Film Festival / February 26 March 3, 2013Submissions are open for one of my favorite film festivals – I’ve judged the shorts competition for several years:

Scheduled for February 26-March 3, 2013, the tenth annual CineKink NYC will feature a specially-curated program of films and videos that celebrate and explore a wide diversity of sexuality. In addition to screenings, plans for the festival also include a short film competition, audience choice awards, a special adult entertainment showcase, and a gala kick-off event, along with retrospective screenings commemorating a decade’s worth of kinky programming. A national tour will follow, showcasing audience favorites from the NYC festival selections.

Billing itself as “the kinky film festival,” the event is presented by CineKink, an organization dedicated to the recognition and encouragement of sex-positive and kink-friendly depictions in film and television. With offerings drawn from both the independent cinema world and the adult, works presented at CineKink NYC will range from documentary to drama, comedy to experimental, slightly spicy to quite explicit–and everything in between.

“It’s so amazing to me that we’ve made it to the decade marker,” said Lisa Vandever, Co-Founder and Director of CineKink. “Looking back on all the films we’ve presented since 2003, it’s incredibly gratifying that we’ve been able to connect such smart and sexy works, and such talented filmmakers, with an appreciative, like-minded audience. And we’re looking forward to another year of it!”

The organization is currently seeking works for CineKink/2013, with a call for entries open until December 11, 2012. The festival line-up and schedule for CineKink NYC will be announced in January.

For more information visit http://www.cinekink.com.

  • ‘A Queer and Pleasant Danger’ by Kate Bornstein | Lambda Literary – In A Queer and Pleasant Danger Bornstein offers a raw exploration of her gender journey, including candid explorations of her lifelong eating disorders and their relationship to her conception of self and gender. Bornstein gives us the opportunity to see behind the scenes and into the early gender outlaw days of one of the most brilliant gender theorists and performance artists of our time. We watch as she grapples with coming out as a lesbian, learning how to work cute as an embodiment of gender, and find power in the body she transforms. Bornstein brings us into her early activist days, including a trip to the trial of Brandon Tina’s murders, visiting the house where Tina died, as well as to the stage of her first queer performance work.
  • When Children See Internet Pornography – NYTimes.com – There is no set script, and no predictable moment for the conversation. It can happen at as early an age as 6 or 7, when a child may not yet understand the basic mechanics of sex. It is typically set off by a child’s accidental wanderings online or the deliberate searches of a curious teenager on a smartphone, laptop, tablet or one of the other devices that have made it nearly impossible to grow up without encountering sexually explicit material. Even a quick Twitter or Facebook search reveals that older students report seeing pornography on others’ laptops or phones in class, usually with an “OMG” attached.
  • Sexuality and Other Female (Film) Troubles – NYTimes.com – “I wanted to make a Merchant-Ivory movie with vibrators,” Ms. Wexler, 42, said sitting in an office in Midtown Manhattan, her long brown hair bouncing every time she let out a booming laugh. “And in doing that, strangely, we’ve shone a light. Can you believe we’re still arguing about these same topics 100 years later — women’s rights over their own body? If a woman is behind the camera, these issues can be explored more than they have in the past.”
  • Sex Ed for Grown Folks — Indiegogo – Support The Garden, a DC based sexual education resource . The money raised here will help create space for people of all ages and walks of life to find the resources they need to ask the questions they might not know how to ask. Space for queer, trans, straight, gay, bi, poly, pomosexual, unsure, in between, on the edge, and in the closet people to come and figure it all out. Take a class. Buy that toy you’ve been eyeing online but needed to feel first. Seek the resources and find the therapists, coaches and body workers who won’t judge you for who are or how you live. Come to The Garden, ask the questions, get educated and find your pleasure.
  • Facebook and poly privacy « Polyamory Weekly – Is it OK to list my relationship status as “open” on Facebook if my girlfriend isn’t out publicly?
  • Library ban on best-seller sparks Florida censorship debate – USATODAY.com – Instead, the Brevard library chose recently to close the book on British author E.L. James’ “Fifty Shades of Grey.” Cathy Schweinsberg, library services director, decided after reading the novel to pull from circulation the system’s 19 copies of “Fifty Shades of Grey,” the first installment in a trilogy.
  • For Ultra-Orthodox Jews in Abuse Cases, a Prosecutor Uses Different Rules – NYTimes.com – Mr. Hynes has won election six times as district attorney thanks in part to support from ultra-Orthodox rabbis, who lead growing communities in neighborhoods like Borough Park and Crown Heights. But in recent years, as allegations of child sexual abuse have shaken the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn, victims’ rights groups have expressed concern that he is not vigorously pursuing these cases because of his deep ties to the rabbis.
  • Why Some Find “Fifty Shades Of Grey” Disturbing, New Film Adaptation Announced, Erotic Novel Generates Controversy – Yet the story is pure fiction and merely a projection of what some women are afraid to admit they want. Anastasia has safe words that she is encouraged to utilize when things go too far. Furthermore, the acts are consensual. The heroine is captivated by Christen and wants to partake in the, sometimes violent, encounters.
  • Mike Fleming’s Q&A; With ‘Fifty Shades Of Grey’ Agent Valerie Hoskins, Broker Of 2012′s Biggest Book Rights Film Deal – Since this was the wildest book auction in years and so many heavy hitters spent the weekend obsessing over it, I wanted to get the play-by-play from Hoskins, the British agent who, it turns out, is a real spitfire. I caught her just before she boarded a plane back across the pond with James, who left with a seven-figure publishing deal in one pocket, and a seven-figure movie rights deal in the other.
  • Call for Submissions: New Views on Pornography: Sexuality, Politics, and the Law – New Views on Pornography is a two-volume collection of the most current scholarship on pornography. This edited series presents empirical research on a range of contemporary issues regarding pornography’s politics, psychology, cultural and legal debates, providing a comprehensive and multidisciplinary overview of the field of porn studies in one convenient location for students, researchers, and professors across related fields. Our goal as editors is to showcase new and innovative research that examines the culture and politics of pornography in a global context, including but not limited to, questions of production, audiences, market niches, technological innovations, political debaest and controversies, obscenity, free speech, public policy and the law. The editors seek well-researched facts and data in order to provide readers with a comprehensive overview of issues on the subject.
  • Ontario’s top court overturns ban on brothels, cites safety of sex workers (AP) – A ban on brothels puts prostitutes at risk and is unconstitutional, Ontario’s top court ruled Monday, in a case that is expected to be appealed to Canada’s top court and have ramifications for the country at large.
  • Anti-Gay Marriage Group’s Leaked Docs Reveal Divide and Conquer Racial Plans (Atlantic Wire) – Late yesterday, the Human Rights Campaign, a gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender civil rights group, obtained “internal NOM documents” that were part of an ongoing investigation by the State of Maine into financial activities by the organization. NOM apparently fought hard to keep those documents sealed, and in reading portions of one of the documents (a 34-page document entitled “The National Strategy for Winning the Marriage Battle”) we understand why. Not only has this organization used ham-fisted approaches to attack the LGBT community, but there’s textual evidence that they aren’t afraid to use a ham-fisted approach to court black and Latino communities.
  • Transgender model disqualified from Miss Universe Canada pageant – Jenna Talackova, 23, was born as a male, but has identified as a female since age 4. She began hormone
    therapy at 14, and underwent gender reassignment surgery at 19, according to a 2010 interview.
  • The Story of a Suicide: Tyler Clementi’s Suicide and Dharun Ravi’s Trial | Ian Parker (The New Yorker) – Two college roommates, a webcam, and a tragedy.
  • Unmasking A Digital Pirate On Amazon | Fast Company – When David H. Springer, a prodigiously productive erotica writer under such naughty pen names as Oediplex and TrojanSnake, learned that one of his stories, “I Remember Mother,” had been scraped off the Web and resold for the Kindle as My Step Mom Loves Me by someone he never heard of, he was, he says, more amused than angry. Still, the 64-year-old security guard, who initially began penning erotica to gain free access to porn sites, could use any income the book generated, no matter how inconsequential. But he doubted it was worth going after Luke Ethan, the person who stole his “stuff-for-stiffies,” nor did he have resources to hire a lawyer.
  • Sexual Obituaries 2011 (Cory Silverberg) – People who choose to work around sexuality and gender often don’t get the acknowledgment from the mainstream media or from society as a whole that they would if their work was in another field. Every year, I feel this absence when I read the lists of famous people who died. Since 2006, I’ve tried to change that by sharing some of the sex and gender activists, educators, artists, and outlaws we lost in the year that is ending. Here is a list of sexual losses in 2011.
  • Director Dee Rees And Star Adepero Oduye Talk Coming Out & Coming Of Age In ‘Pariah’ | indieWIRE – Pariah is the story of Alike (Oduye), a black lesbian teenager living in Fort Greene and navigating between the aggressive gay nightclub scene preferred by her butch best friend Laura (Pernell Walker) and a closeted life at home, where her tightly wound mother Audrey (Kim Wayans) tries to dress her in pink cardigans and quizzes her about who she’s taking to the school dance.
  • Bondage Sex And The Liberation Of Culture – ErosBlog: The Sex Blog – For anybody with an interest in cultural history — and especially, aspects of cultural history that have ever been covert or officially suppressed, like porn — it’s this “everything floats up to the surface and becomes visible, in time” aspect of the Internet that is most miraculous. It’s far from complete, mind you — we have many centuries of recorded culture that have yet to be digitized and brought up from their buried layers of stone and canvas and paper and cellulose and vinyl and magnetic tape.
  • 2011 Top Ten Sex Questions (Cory Silverberg) – I don’t dig into my statistics all that often, but once a year I like to see which questions and answers were the most popular…These ten questions are from the 105 Sex Questions that I’ve answered on the About.com site.
  • Navigating Love and Autism – NYTimes.com- Only since the mid-1990s have a group of socially impaired young people with otherwise normal intelligence and language development been recognized as the neurological cousins of nonverbal autistic children. Because they have a hard time grasping what another is feeling — a trait sometimes described as “mindblindness” — many assumed that those with such autism spectrum disorders were incapable of, or indifferent to, intimate relationships. Parents and teachers have focused instead on helping them with school, friendship and, more recently, the workplace.Yet as they reach adulthood, the overarching quest of many in this first generation to be identified with Asperger syndrome is the same as many of their nonautistic peers: to find someone to love who will love them back. [via Violet Blue]
  • When Will a Gay Pro Athlete Finally Come Out? — New York Magazine – “Something has happened in the last year,” says Jim Buzinski, co-founder of OutSports, an advocate for and chronicler of gay sports issues for more than a decade. “It’s almost like homophobia is no longer considered cool in sports.”
  • Australian Passport Gender Options: ‘Transgender’ Will Be Included | HuffPo – Australian passports will now have three gender options – male, female and indeterminate – under new guidelines to remove discrimination against transgender people, the government said Thursday.

cinekink300x200 Submit to Cinekink! Call for Entries   CineKink/2012CineKink –”the kinky film festival”–is seeking films and videos, of any length and genre, that explore and celebrate the wide diversity of sexuality. Dedicated to the recognition and encouragement of sex-positive and kink-friendly depictions in film and television, we’re looking to blur some boundaries and will be considering offerings drawn from both Hollywood and beyond, with works ranging from documentary to drama, camp comedy to hot porn, mildly spicy to quite explicit–and everything in between.

Cutting across orientations, topics covered at CineKink have included–but are by no means limited to–BDSM, leather and fetish, swinging, non-monogamy and polyamory, roleplay and gender bending, sex work and sex geekery. Basically, as long as it involves consenting adults, just about anything celebrating sex as a right of self expression is fair game. (Far be it from us to define “kink” – if you think your work might make sense in this context, please send it along!)

Scheduled for its ninth annual appearance in February 2012, the specially-curated CineKink NYC will also feature a short film competition, audience choice awards, a special adult entertainment showcase, presentations, parties and a gala kick-off event, with a national screening tour to follow.

Discounted, early-bird entries have a post-marked deadline of October 28th, while the regular deadline is November 18th and the final deadline is December 5th.

For more information and to download an entry form or submissions via Withoutabox, visit http://cinekink.com/programs-and-events/call-for-entries/.